(03-03-2013 01:15 AM)Heywood Jahblome Wrote: God could have numerous reasons for not wanting to be tested that do not include pride. Calling God a dick suggests that you know God cares more about his pride then people's welfare. Did you recieve this devine revelation or are you just calling God a dick because you're a........

I know precisely as much about god as you do. Nothing.

Then you have no cause to call God a dick do you?
Methinks you've been tersed.

If you read my introduction in the introduction thread. I claimed right there that I wasn't interested in defending any religion nor am I interested in converting anyone on this forum to a religion. With that in mind, I should have just ignored what you said about your great example of prayer not working and left it that. If I am unwilling to comment on it, then I shouldn't have commented on it. I baited you and that was wrong.

I rarely read the introduction threads, so I did not know that.

I have not made any examples, someone else did. But yes, I think it was a great example.

If you won't defend your position on religious matters and give an explanation to stuff like this, how will you challenge our worldview?...

(03-03-2013 01:28 AM)Heywood Jahblome Wrote: Regarding the bolded part: Sure, anyone can deny any study they want for all sorts of reasons. However in this case a rational person will deny the validity of a prayer study because it is fatally flawed for the reasons I have pointed out. Further the reason the prayer study is invalid has nothing to do with God's existence. It has to do with the inability to secure the cooperation of an existent or non-existent God. If you claim the prayer study isn't about testing God thats fine, but then you can't credibly claim prayer studies prove prayers to God don't work or are evidence that God does not exist.
Regarding the Jesus part. I could refute that but I won't. Some other theist can if they want. I am not here to defend any religion or try to convert you to a religion. I am here to challenge your world veiw.

You didn't actually argue about "why" the study is fatally flawed, but rather you bolstered your case by implying it was "rational" (through reference to "a rational person" agreeing with you). I make tremendous efforts to think objectively and rationally. I hope you are as well.

You keep assuming that someone has to "secure the cooperation of an existent or non-existent God". Why would anyone have to secure the cooperation of a non-existent God? There's no good reason to try adjusting a test to account for a non-existent being's non-existent manipulation of an experiment. Surely this is obvious. But there's also no good reason to adjust for an existent God's manipulation until there's evidence that such manipulation actually affects the experiment.

Let's say that we want to run a test to verify the claim that all objects are equally affected by the Earth's gravity (by dropping 2 objects). We would certainly want to account for known factors such as air resistance (by running the experiment in a vacuum), but there's no reason to account for the gravitational effects of Jupiter on our experiment until it can be shown that Jupiter's gravity affects our test -- and it has nothing to do with whether we believe Jupiter exists or has gravity! The important thing is whether Jupiter's gravity can be shown (with actual evidence) to factually mess with our experiment's results. Until that can be demonstrated, the experiment's results can be accepted without the Jupiter excuse. There is no need to secure the cooperation of Jupiter or its gravitational pull until it is proven that such a thing can affect the results of our experiment.

My girlfriend is mad at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried cooking a stick in her non-stick pan.